Hollywood, as we have been learning, is a mean place to work. To obscene pay inequities and outrageous sexual misconduct, we can now add abusive on-set treatment of female actors to extract the most realistic performance for the screen.

Thank Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino for this latest conversation about the uglier aspects of Tinseltown, where a mania for onscreen "authenticity" comes dangerously close to abuse — or even death — on set.

Is the jig finally up? One can only hope.

In case you missed it, Tarantino is the director acclaimed as an auteur and equally infamous for his over-the-top style of moviemaking. One of his biggest stars, Thurman, has lately described precisely what that has meant for her:

The spitting scene? "Naturally, I did it. Who else should do it? A grip? ... So I asked Uma. I said, I think I need to do it. I’ll only do it twice, at the most, three times. But I can’t have you laying here, getting spit on, again and again and again, because somebody else is messing it up by missing. It is hard to spit on people, as it turns out."

The choking scene? "It was Uma’s suggestion. To just wrap the thing around her neck, and choke her. Not forever, not for a long time. But it’s not going to look right. 'I can act all strangle-ey, but if you want my face to get red and the tears to come to my eye, then you kind of need to choke me.' ... Consequently, I realize … that is a real thing."

The driving scene? He said he wanted her to drive 30 to 45 mph, "just to get the hair blowing," but he tested the road himself and thought she could do it safely.

"None of us ever considered it a stunt. It was just driving. None of us looked at it as a stunt. Maybe we should have, but we didn’t. I’m sure when it was brought up to me (that she had trepidations) that I rolled my eyes and was irritated."

Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo in 'Frida.'(Photo: Peter Sorel/Miramax)

He felt horrible when she crashed: "Just horrible. Watching her fight for the wheel …remembering me hammering about how it was safe and she could do it. Emphasizing that it was a straight road, a straight road … the fact that she believed me, and I literally watched this little S curve pop up. And it spins her like a top. It was heartbreaking. Beyond one of the biggest regrets of my career, it is one of the biggest regrets of my life. For a myriad of reasons."

She was badly injured but she didn't die. Ask director John Landis how horrified he felt after actor Vic Morrow and two child actors were killed in 1982 when a helicopter crashed on them on the set of his Twilight Zone movie.

Landis and three other filmmakers were found innocent of involuntary manslaughter charges at a trial five years later; at the time, he was the only Hollywood director ever to be criminally charged for deaths on a set. (He was still working, as a producer, director and as an actor, as recently as 2015.)

Director John Landis at the 74th Venice Film Festival in 2017.(Photo: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images)

"If there is (another) director out there who is willing to sacrifice or to risk sacrificing human lives for the sake of reality ... (perhaps) that director will (now) think twice," Deputy District Attorney Lea Purwin D'Agostino, the Los Angeles prosecutor, said before the verdict, according to The Los Angeles Times.

But this impulse to intensify the authenticity of an onscreen experience is as old as Hollywood itself — in fact, it might be its whole point.

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In a recent New York Times op-ed, actress Uma Thurman revealed Harvey Weinstein shoved her and 'tried to expose himself.' A Weinstein spokesperson says Weinstein misread her signals.
Wochit

Male actors are probably subjected to mistreatment and danger on set, too. (Think Martin Sheen, who nearly died in the jungle during the shooting of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, a chaotic nightmare of a production in 1979, according to film historians.) But women have been the most obvious victims of abuse-for-art impulses over the years.

• The late Maria Schneider, who co-starred with Marlon Brando in 1972's Last Tango in Paris, said in 2007 that the infamous rape scene — in which a stick of butter is used to rape her character — wasn't in the script. In a 2013 interview, Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci admitted that he and Brando came up with the idea in order to get a reaction from Schneider, who died in 2011 at age 58.

“I was so angry,” she said. “I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set, because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script, but at the time, I didn’t know that. … I was crying real tears.”

• Meryl Streep says she was shocked and furious at Dustin Hoffman when he unexpectedly slapped her right before the cameras rolled for 1979's Kramer vs. Kramer, her first movie role and her first Oscar win. "And it was my first take in my first movie, and he just slapped me. And you see it in the movie. It was overstepping,” Streep told The New York Times last month.

He also shattered a wine glass in the middle of a scene without warning Streep, who ended up with shards of glass in her hair, according to producer Sherry Lansing’s book.

• Salma Hayek described in a column for The New York Times how she was repeatedly sexually harassed by producer Harvey Weinstein, including being compelled to film a gratuitous lesbian sex scene for her 2002 passion project, Frida, after Weinstein threatened to shut down the film.

"He would let me finish the film if I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman," she wrote. "And he demanded full-frontal nudity." But she struggled to film the scene. "My body began to shake uncontrollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry. ... It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein. ... I had to take a tranquilizer, which eventually stopped the crying but made the vomiting worse."

• Melissa Gilbert once ran out of an audition in tears because, she says, director Oliver Stone intentionally tried to humiliate and degrade her by making her do a "dirty" sex scene in an audition for 1991's The Doors, as payback for a time she had embarrassed him in a social situation.

Stone denies this and said in a statement to Deadline that it was made clear to performers that the film was going to be "a raunchy, no-holds-barred rock ‘n’ roll movie.”

Shelley Duvall in 'The Shining.'(Photo: Warner Bros.)

• Shelley Duvall has said that she was driven nearly mad by the ultimate auteur director, the late Stanley Kubrick, on the set of 1980's The Shining because of his methods, including filming scenes again and again until the actors were nearly in tears. The famous baseball bat confrontation between Duvall and co-star Jack Nicholson supposedly took a world-record 127 takes, according to Rolling Stone.

"Going through day after day of excruciating work was almost unbearable," Duvall told Roger Ebert in December 1980. "Jack Nicholson's character had to be crazy and angry all the time. And in my character, I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. I was there a year and a month. ... After all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn't there."

• Tippi Hedren says late director Alfred Hitchcock made her time on the set of 1963's The Birds a living hell with his stalking and obsessiveness. For the film’s climactic scene, Hitchcock instructed the crew to unleash live birds on Hedren rather than the fake ones they’d been using, leaving her with real cuts and scratches on her face — along with real terror.

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Producer Harvey Weinstein was a Hollywood power broker for decades before a series of sexual harassment charges saw him ejected from his company as well as a variety of top filmmaker associations. Jordan Strauss, Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

Kevin Spacey, seen here in 2016, has reportedly lost both his agent and publicist as a result of his sexual-harassment scandal. He's also been completely replaced in his latest movie. NICHOLAS KAMM, AFP/Getty Images

Software engineer Susan Fowler's blog post about sexual harassment and misconduct at Uber ignited an uproar, toppling CEO Travis Kalanick and unleashing a series of revelations in Silicon Valley that led to the ouster of two technology investors. Will Oliver, European Pressphoto Agency

Anchor Bill O'Reilly was the high-paid face of Fox News before The New York Times revealed that the host had reached payout settlements with half a dozen women who had accused him of sexual misconduct. Fox fired O'Reilly in April after advertisers pulled out of his show, "The O'Reilly Factor." Richard Drew, AP

Dozens of women have accused Bill Cosby of using date-rape drugs to molest them throughout his career. The accusations, which ended in a June mistrial, caused NBC and Netflix to cancel programming discussions with the comedian in 2014. Matt Rourke, AP

Fashion photographer Terry Richardson, who has taken photos of Beyonce, Rihanna and Miley Cyrus, was banned by Conde Nast for sexual assault allegations that have been circulating since 2010. In a statement, Richardson admitted he sometimes behaved in a sexually explicit manner during photo shoots. Richard Shotwell, AP

In August, producer Isa Hackett accused Amazon Studios chief Roy Price of making unwanted sexual remarks. It wasn't until after the Weinstein scandal broke that Price was forced out of his high-profile job. Barry Brecheisen, AP

One-time New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier apologized to past staffers for behavior that accusers say included inappropriate touching. The Emerson Collective immediately pulled its support for a magazine Wieseltier was set to publish. June 9, 2013 photo by AP

Mike Oreskes resigned as NPR's senior vice president for news after two women accused him of kissing them while discussing job prospects when he worked for the New York Times in Washington, D.C. Chuck Zoeller, AP